Media coverage of this Summer’s events in Los Angeles focused largely on President Donald Trump’s unprecedented decision to send the California National Guard and U.S. Marines to quell protests against immigration raids. But another federal force has gotten less attention: The Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service (FPS), which deployed numerous agents to the streets of Los Angeles.
Charged with protecting federal buildings, FPS has sweeping police powers that go far beyond that mandate and make the agency vulnerable to political weaponization. Its presence in Los Angeles may be an opening salvo, as similar protests crop up in cities around the country. State and local authorities in California and nationwide should act fast to prevent the abuse of their resources and mitigate harm.
Thanks to permissive laws enacted by Congress in the early war-on-terror years, FPS has broad authority to augment its core workforce of roughly 1,300 employees and 13,000 contract guards by drawing on a pool of up to 90,000 personnel from other arms of DHS, such as border patrol and secret service agents. In Los Angeles, some FPS-activated border patrol agents—a group with little training in crowd control and a history of alleged human rights violations and sexual abuse—fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters. Reporting indicates that the “special operations” division of border patrol—a unit that previously deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan—descended upon Los Angeles, followed by more units. DHS appears to have deployed Predator drones to conduct overhead surveillance.
A review I conducted of insignia, uniforms, and locations across numerous videos, images, and reports online shows FPS officers, border patrol agents, and special response teams in Los Angeles firing tear gas, projectiles, and other so-called “less-lethal weapons” on protestors on city streets or near the Metropolitan Detention Center where the government is holding immigrants. This is a massive show of force against protesters that, in some instances, have numbered only in the “dozens” or “hundreds,” with the likely effect of intimidating others from exercising their right to dissent Protestors and journalists who allege DHS officers harmed them with projectiles have sued the government.
Read More: What the National Guard Crackdown in LA Made Us See
What’s next? Events in the summer of 2020, during the first Trump Administration, may shed light on where this is headed. In response to racial justice demonstrations, FPS cracked down on protests in Portland, Oregon, sending hundreds of officers—including 300 border patrol tactical officers—to suppress sustained demonstrations that included vandalism of a federal courthouse. Over the objections of local authorities, federal officers under FPS’s command fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters and threw a number of them into unmarked vans. Earlier this year, the federal government agreed to a paid settlement in a lawsuit brought by protesters and press for its violation of their constitutional rights.
Only the week before the Los Angeles immigration raids, on May 28, FPS officers forced their way into Congressman Jerry Nadler’s office in New York City and handcuffed and detained an aide who had refused them entry. Without providing evidence, agents accused the office of “harboring rioters” opposed to homeland security agents arresting immigrants in court one floor below. Nadler’s office maintained the action was retaliation for inviting immigration advocates into the building.
A big part of the problem is that in 2002 Congress authorized FPS officers to work off-site to the extent “necessary” to protect federal property—but failed to set any limits on that authority. That open-ended directive, combined with weak internal safeguards, has led to sweeping off-site operations. The secretary of homeland security can also direct the agency to take undefined actions “for the promotion of homeland security”—a vague formulation that gives officials wide latitude to determine what those actions might be.
FPS has used this broad policing authority in the recent past to monitor people for their political activities and target events that, as agency personnel have acknowledged, lacked any plausible connection to federal property. Those have included Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, a convoy of anti-vaccine truckers, and recent college protests over the war in Gaza.
FPS, border patrol, and other federal police are aided in many jurisdictions around the country by significant access to city and state resources, as well as private intelligence contractors. DHS cuts deals with local jurisdictions to gain access to their databases and intelligence facilities, such as the Los Angeles area Joint Regional Intelligence Center. Federal agents access city or state data they then feed into investigations of residents.
So-called “sanctuary laws,” like Los Angeles’s 2024 ordinance or the California Values Act, prohibit the collection or sharing of certain immigration-related information. However, they do not prevent any collaboration when it comes to protesters, meaning Los Angeles’ resources are up for grabs to help the federal crackdown on dissent.
Read More: LA Superintendent Speaks Out Against Trump Immigration Raids
Given this history of abuse, the Los Angeles City Council and California state legislature—and local and state governments throughout the country—should pass laws constraining coordination with DHS agents to police protesters and ensure DHS cannot coopt local resources. A spate of court decisions, including a recent one in Chicago, have overwhelmingly upheld state governments’ constitutional right to opt out of assisting federal law enforcement.
A set of principles for engagement with federal agencies could give local officials a critical starting point. Restrictions should include prohibiting sharing information about residents, removing federal agents from local police facilities, and rescinding or narrowing authorizations to enforce local law.
Ultimately, it will take an act of Congress to rein in the laws that give the Federal Protective Service such broad latitude to crack down on protesters and put Border Patrol in the streets. But cities and states need not be complicit in the Department of Homeland Security’s abuse of their residents exercising their rights to political expression.
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